📖Summary

This page will explain to you how Master-Tek came to be and the purpose of its creation.

My name is Ryan Power and I am 23 years old as I write this. I have been an automotive technician for close to five years now working as a flat-rate tech for the last two years. Being a member of the generation that tends to favor technology in many cases I wondered if there was a program that technicians could use to keep track of notes, pictures and other information for each vehicle we work on other then the software the shop typically provides if your shop does so.

I concluded my search efforts with the result that there wasn't really a software designed specifically for the technicians, most of them were designed for the shop settings where you couldn't use it as an individual technician.

I luckily enjoy spending my spare time learning about computer programming and trying to increase my skillset when it comes to it and was able to treat the development of this application as a lesson. So basically I was learning how to make this program as I progressed with it.

The whole idea of creating the program was to display information that techs use on a regular basis without the tech having to do a whole lot prior to seeing it. The other goal was to be able to assist technicians across North America identify the cause of many issues with a vehicle even with little to no experience with the make or model they are working on.

I thought the idea of a community driven platform where myself and other technicians could enter our findings regarding issues or other information pertaining to a specific vehicle would be a clever way to identify issues that have been seen elsewhere by a technician but never seen before by you or any of your colleagues.

I created the application to know nothing when it started up for the first time. The only capability the program has is the ability to decode a VIN, other then that everything the application knows was entered by another user for other users to see.

When a user scans/enters the VIN of a vehicle the program will decode the vin so it knows what vehicle you are working on, it will then search Master-Tek's database for any past entries made by other users pertaining to the same vehicle that you are working on. If no information is available then it means that no other user has entered any info regarding the vehicle and the database does not have any information for your vehicle. The corresponding fields will display "N/A" when no information is available.

If a field displays "N/A" or you believe that the info in the field is incorrect you may update it by entering the correct information then clicking the update button. This will upload the information to the Master-Tek database where it will be accessible to other users when a similar vehicle is entered on their end.

I like to refer to this as a glorified interactive forum for technicians to easily find information related to the vehicle they are working on. A lot of the time the best approach is to proceed with your regular diagnosis as what you read on the application may not always be accurate. The application is purely community driven and requires a community of users to make it useful to any extent, it is meant to be used as a tool not a replacement, use it to your best judgement.

The date when I am writing this is March 1, 2024 and have covered majority of the features available in the application and will update this as I make changes and/or add or remove features. I have plans to add many more features that will hopefully effectively help with a technicians efficiency.